Mill Creek Park Run

This morning my brother Jeff and I met Stacy (2nd from left) and his son Taylor (4th from left) at the Lily Pond parking lot for a long run at Mill Creek Park in Youngstown. We weren't sure whether or not we'd be on the trails or the road, but we started out on the trail. It didn't take long however to figure out that we'd be heading onto the road for the rest of our run. The trails had a good 3-4 inches on them and we knew that if we wanted to get in some good mileage today that we'd have to hit the pavement.

Once we got on the road we then headed towards the Old Log Cabin and ran around Lake Glacier. On the east side of Lake Glacier we continued over towards Pioneer Pavillion. It was around this point when Taylor, my brother, and I looked back and didn't see Stacy. We figured he had taken the all purpose road up high on the hill and after looking up, we noticed that he was up there. We yelled to him and said we'd meet him further down in the park. So the three of us then crossed over to the west side of the lake by Pioneer Pavillion and continued heading south. As you can tell from this photo, the roads in the park weren't cleaned off as well as they usually are and caused us to slip quite a bit going up hills...

Along the way we ran into another one of our running buddies, Bruce McMurray, around the Steel Bridge. This is a beautiful piece of work and I'm glad that the park was able to recieve grant money to restore this bridge to its original state last fall. Here's what it looks like...

Soon we were getting close to Lanterman's Mill and still no sign of Stacy, so my brother and Taylor turned around and ran back to see if he was heading our way. I ran with Bruce for a little bit more until he had to turn off and run back to his car and then I turned around and headed back to meet everyone. Just as I got past the bridge near the Mill I saw them coming.

Once we met up, all of us then continued south towards Lake Newport (which is connected to the other two lakes - Glacier and Cohasset) and ran around it. Stacy and I stuck together while Jeff and Taylor pulled ahead. The slick roads were starting to tire out our hips and muscles that you don't usually use at this point, so we made it a point to stop a couple times and stretch. As we reached our turn around point at Shields Road we were around 8-9 miles so we knew we'd have some decent mileage once we finished up back at our cars. Soon we were back at Lanterman's Mill and I stopped to take this video on the bridge above to show how nice the scenery was today...

As we arrived back at our cars, Jeff and Taylor were already there. I looked down at my watch and it said that we were just over 12.5 miles so Stacy recommended that we run around the Lily Pond to get an even 13 miles.

Once we were finished we noticed that the clouds in the sky had almost completely gone away now and we stood around and talked for a bit to savor the moment. Yes folks, believe it or not here are a couple pictures to prove that blue skies still exist in N.E. Ohio...